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Thursday, March 29, 2018

From a letter --

Politics here are as usual beyond horror... but it is clear that the coming generations are primed for multicultural social democracy, the GOP is clinging to power by their fingernails, their criminality is a measure of their desperation, they feel the world that is coming will repudiate the lies against which we have struggled all our lives. They can do untold damage before they are through, of course, and are doing their worst all around us, but I am beginning to think once more that we will prevail... Our generation, generation X and X-ish, was a considerably smaller population cohort than the Boomers behind us or the Millennials after us and I now believe that quite a lot of our trouble is that we simply didn't have the numbers to defend ourselves against the worst selfish impulses of our human, all too human (and, not to put too fine a point on it, racist cis greedhead as hell), parents... but in rebuilding a world that works for the majority of the young people coming after us I suspect they will also join their numbers to our long ineffectual efforts to save ourselves... they will save and expand social security, expand medicare into single payer, and employ everybody building a sustainable agriculture and communication and energy infrastructure in the context of a less racist, less sexist, less toxic society...

It's taken a couple of years, but after my hospitalization, the Trump election, a union battle, the loss of Sarah, and a struggle with chronic insomnia it would appear that my inner Mouseketeer is beginning to re-assert herself...

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Interesting posting. You might want to read the Rickard Rorty article in VOX at the link below. He has an interesting perspective of the goals of the reformist left and the cultural left for the future.https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/9/14543938/donald-trump-richard-rorty-election-liberalism-conservatives

It's funny, what that article calls a "forgotten book" by Rorty was read by me at the time of its publication -- and not at all forgotten. It's a pretty good book by Rorty, I suppose, given the political focus. I think all can agree it was a minor effort compared to others, especially his _Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity_, which I even taught at Cal a couple of times in the Rhet Department over ten years ago and still appreciate quite a bit. Michael Berube's sympathetic review of the book at the time was pretty fair as I remember it. When all is said and done there was far too much hesitancy and double-talking about facing up to white-racism and queer-bashing in Rorty's "prophesy" and there remains too much of the same in Vox's later praise of it in my view, mild genuflections to "resentments" and "cultural politics" here and there notwithstanding. Clearly the next generations are going to have to do a lot of rebuilding (and in the context of mounting climate catastrophes too) of the unions and public services and accountable governing institutions dismantled by boomers who didn't have enough kids like me to organize in adequate numbers to protect the world from a generational onslaught of their short-sighted short-term selfishness and ugly prejudices from Reagan to Gingrich to W. to Tea Party to Trump.